A Ubiquity symposium is an organized debate around a proposition or point of view. It is a means to explore a complex issue from multiple perspectives. An early example of a symposium on teaching computer science appeared in Communications of the ACM (December 1989).

Symposia

2012

The first article in this symposium, which originally appeared in the Communication the ACM, is courtesy of ACM President Vinton Cerf. Earlier this year, he called on all ACM members to commit to building a stronger science base for computer science. Cerf cites numerous open questions, mostly in software development, that cry out for experimental studies.

The recent interest in encouraging more middle and high school students to prepare for careers in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) has rekindled the old debate about whether computer science is really science. It matters today because computing is such a central field, impacting so many other fields, and yet it is often excluded from high school curricula because it is not seen as a science. In this symposium, fifteen authors examine different aspects from what is science, to natural information processes, to new science-enabled approaches in STEM education.

In this article, Moshe Sipper discusses a foreseeable future in which an entirely new paradigm of producing software will emerge. Sipper calls this software engineering revolution, "Darwinian Software Engineering"---a time when it will be possible to program computers by means of evolution.

In this article evolutionary computation (EC) is considered as a kind of nature-inspired computing (NIC) paradigm. EC not only has great effect on the development of computing methods from structure to process, but also has great effect on many aspects of our society as a ubiquitous or general computational thinking. EC is still one of the best choices for problem solving among all methods when people face more and more complex problems.

During the past 35 years the evolutionary computation research community has been studying properties of evolutionary algorithms. Many claims have been made---these varied from a promise of developing an automatic programming methodology to solving virtually any optimization problem (as some evolutionary algorithms are problem independent). However, the most important claim was related to applicability of evolutionary algorithms to solving very complex business problems, i.e. problems, where other techniques failed. So it might be worthwhile to revisit this claim and to search for evolutionary algorithm-based software applications, which were accepted by businesses and industries. In this article Zbigniew Michalewicz attempts to identify reasons for the mismatch between the efforts of hundreds of researchers who make substantial contribution to the field of evolutionary computation and the number of real-world applications, which are based on concepts of evolutionary algorithms.

In this article in the ACM Ubiquity symposium on evolutionary computation Max H. Garzon presents reflections on the connections between evolutionary computation, natural computation, and current definitions of computer science. The primary aim and result is a more coherent, comprehensive and modern definition of computer science.

In this third article in the ACM Ubiquity symposium on evolutionary computation Xin Yao provides a deeper understanding of evolutionary algorithms in the context of classical computational paradigms. This article discusses some of the most important issues in evolutionary computation. Three major areas are identified. The first is the theoretical foundation of evolutionary computation, especially the computational time complexity analysis. The second is on algorithm design, especially on hybridization, memetic algorithms, algorithm portfolios and ensembles of algorithms. The third is co-evolution, which seems to be under studied in both theory and practice. The primary aim of this article is to stimulate further discussions, rather than to offer any solutions.

Evolution is one of the indispensable processes of life. After biologists found basic laws of evolution, computer scientists began simulating evolutionary processes and using operations discovered in nature for solving problems with computers. As a result, they brought forth evolutionary computation, inventing different kinds operations and procedures, such as genetic algorithms or genetic programming, which imitated natural biological processes. Thus, the main goal of our Symposium is exploration of the essence and characteristic properties of evolutionary computation in the context of life and computation.